Tag: pencil drawing

So. I really need to stress this. If you are doing this challenge along with me. DO NOT TAKE A PICTURE OF YOUR LIPS AND DRAW THEM. You must use your reflection. Why? First off, when a photo is taken, it flattens the image it captures, so you lose a lot of information from a photo versus drawing something from real life.

Second. This is supposed to be a small, honest evaluation of yourself in the present moment. Yesterday, when I took those photos of my own lips in various expressions, that’s what I was drawing them for, the expressions.

When you’re drawing from your reflection, in theory, unless you’re posing, you’re capturing certain parts of your thoughts, feelings, and psyche at that present time. There was a self portrait I painted last year while I was in Italy, and it looked like a zombie because it was so cloudy/acid rainy for months on end and I was pretty miserable at that moment. You capture weird things like that.

As you can see below, I look pretty miserable because I am! I’m really sick right now (which is why I’m here blogging rather than at my day job). My own throat is trying to suffocate me and it feels as though there’s a mining company that’s taking up residence in my skull and tunneling away at it.

I actually put on lipstick because my lips were so pale.Sick… but must… continue… creating….

For this entry, I drew four lips from Old Master paintings. The reason why I included an exercise involving Old Master art is because I believe studying their techniques helps improve your art style. You can almost see how they held their pencils, what colors they used, and how they achieved a semi-realistic image.

So, no side by side because the image is in a private collection and copy-righted, but you can see the original here.

So, some reflections. I did this on my lunch break, in the middle of the day, so it was a nice break away from work. I also need to get an actual printer/scanner at some point. My phone takes good pictures, but you can tell it’s a photo on a non-flat sketchbook. If I do this prompt again, I think I’m going to take the original portraits (as long as they’re not copy-righted), and use Photoshop to put the lips I drew over the portraits to keep it fun. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time, but I’m jotting this down so that I remember to do it again or hopefully if you guys are doing this exercise with me, you can do that!

Thanks for following my journey to improve this aspect of the face. Stick around for more!